VMworld #VMworld – Day 2 – Keynote, Sessions on NSX, EUC and performance

So today was the first day of proper sessions and the keynote.

This is my first year at VMworld, but you can tell there is something missing slightly, and probably that is a big announcement, we already know about NSX, and most people are waiting for vSphere 6. However with the release of the delta exam on 5.5 it’s obvious that vSphere 6 will be here at some point in 2015.

The announcements kind of lead on from those made in SF in August,

– vCloud suite 5.8
– vVols
– vRealize Air Automation
– EVO:Rail
– vSan 2.0

So, Palo Alto partnership with VMware in regards to NSX.

HP, Hitachi, Supermicro added to the list of hardware providers for EVO:Rail

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vCloud Air will now be extended to a data center home in Germany,

Horizon Flex, providing the flexibility to BYOD users whilst maintaining the security and control of a corporate device/desktop.

The main buzzword around all of this is systems need to be like liquid, forever flowing. Watch the video of huge keynote, you’ll get the gist.

So the sessions, first up was NET3305 Virtualise your network with VMware NSX , a decent session explaining the background that lead to the incarnation of NSX, and I know feel as if I understand it’s placement better, the speaker Martin Casado really knew his stuff. NSX will be big but not straight away if you ask me personally, it will take time to adopt, but I plan on doing the VCP-NV exam so expect some revision notes and more content on NSX from me. It’s a shame I didn’t book in more NSX sessions to be honest.

Here are some of the notes I made;

 
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Tradition dc – l2/l3 network

Modern dc – ip network, layer 3, no spanning tree etc – sec/load balancing etc done at customer application layer, rather than network.

Reasons to virt network
Speed
Economics
Security

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Security spend is less than security losses

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Modern attack
1. Prep – human recon
2. Intrusion – compromise, install and control (strain a, active, strain b, dormant)
3. Recon – escalate priv, lateral movement,
4. Recovery – remove strain a, b takes over, adds c
5. Act on intent – exploit weak visibility, and limited internal control points, break into data stores, obfuscate
6. Ex filtration – ex filtrate, cleanup

Exploits are slow, interactive,

80% of resources focused on prevention
Limited visibility and control to detect and respond to attacks in datacenter.

NSX- micro segmentation – sees all traffic, firewalling between vm’s.

20GB/s firewalling per host

Only 20% of data leaves datacenter

Hyper visor is a Goldilocks zone, if endpoint is comp, you can turn off security controls
If ip network compromised, there’s still something sat in the way at the hyper visor, can only see traffic here, as ip network doesn’t know about user security (ad auth)

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The next session was VAPP2305 Extreme performance series – applications that require extra TLC on vSphere. Was a little disappointing tbh, the main points to take away is to always make sure you follow best practises and are fully patched before consulting with the VMware team, the examples given in this session were so unique that even VMware couldn’t recreate them, part of the session were also talking about java applications running on a VM that ran efficiently on one processor architecture but not others. The detail used went over my head, I do hope others got something out of it though.

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The final session was EUC2219 Quantifying the business value of VMware Horizon. Many don’t realise but I actually spent 3 years running an EUC environment, and the technology still interests me a great deal, I truly believe that it is the correct solution for many customers, so this session was to help me get back into the mindset of EUC Selling points etc. The session focused on how to do a cost analysis which you can taylor to your customers needs to help them realise the benefits of EUC, which was quite interesting. Kudos to the customer who also talks through his deployment in the last ten minutes of the session.

Other parts of my day were spent mingling around the solutions exchange where you find all the vendors and their freebies, I mean products and solutions.

I can’t say I really impressed by anything, other than HGST PCI card which holds 4.8TB of data! I’m going to hit the solutions exchange again and speak to some more vendors today, as well as take an I depth look at the EVO:rail product in its designated area.

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Over and out, Dean.

P.s the Veeam, party wasn’t bad at all 😉

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